Sunday, 25 August 2019

The Guardian: Clumsy and Insensitive Translations Can Ruin the Enjoyment of a Foreign-language Film

This year, however, subtitles have been
attracting more attention than usual. In January, Alfonso Cuarón condemned
Netflix’s decision to add Castilian-Spanish subs to his film Roma
as “parochial, ignorant and offensive to Spaniards”, who presumably couldn’t be
trusted to understand the Mexican accent. Two days later, the Castilian
subtitles were removed.

But criticism of Roma’s subtitles didn’t
stop there. In February, the ATAA (Association des Traducteurs/Adaptateurs de
l’Audiovisuel) pointed out that the film’s French subtitles were full of grammatical
errors, spelling mistakes and mistranslations. The ATAA’s chairperson, Ian
Burley, who has been subtitling French, Belgian and Italian movies for more
than 30 years, also took a look at Roma’s English subtitles, and found them riddled with
stylistic inconsistencies, sloppy synchronisation and clumsy line breaks or
punctuation, all of which are liable to distract or discombobulate the viewer.
And in the riot scene, a woman’s desperate exhortation of “Vamos!” (“Come
on!”) to a dying man whose head she is cradling is clumsily translated as
“Let’s go!” – as though she thinks he is dawdling.

Concerned not just by the problems with
Roma, well publicised because of the Oscar-winning film’s high profile, but by
a more general decline in subtitling standards, AVTE (AudioVisual Translators
Europe) is collaborating with its member associations (including the British
Subtitlers’ Association, Subtle) in a call for film-makers to
cooperate more closely with professional subtitlers, reminding them that
subtitling is a craft – an art, even – that ought not to be left to amateurs or
automatic translation software.

Nowadays, clients provide translators
with digital copies of the film, usually (but not always) with a transcript of
the dialogue. Sometimes when the film reaches the subtitler, it has already
been “spotted” by a subtitling lab, although the younger generation of
subtitlers often do their own “spotting” – the technical process that fixes the
entry and exit point for each subtitle and provides the character count for
optimum legibility. “In a perfect world,” says Burley, “a subtitle will never
go over a change of shot, but that is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid
in today’s films, which are often more rapidly edited than older movies.”

The art of translation requires more
than just fluency in several languages, and there is a lot more to it than
simply translating the dialogue. “The subtitler must decide what to prioritise
at any given moment, in order to best serve the interests of the film,” says
David Buchanan, a freelance translator specialising in French to English
subtitling, and a member of Subtle. “For instance, legibility. Is the subtitle
clearly laid out? Does the text flow in a clear and logical way? Is the
subtitle on screen long enough for the viewer to read it properly?”

Jacqueline Ball, a freelance translator
specialising in German to English subtitling, says: “With subtitling, unlike
text translation, you often have to make very difficult choices regarding what
you can retain due to reading speed (which, on average, is 15 to 17 characters
a second for adult viewers), how many characters fit on a line (usually between
37 and 42) and the number of lines – which, in foreign-language subtitling, as
opposed to hard-of-hearing subtitling, is always limited to two.”

It’s also important for subtitles to
take into account the characters’ ages, social class, personalities and moods,
as well as the historical period in which a film is set.

A knowledge of the
plot is essential; when space is tight, you can’t cut dialogue about a gun if
someone is going to be firing it in the third act. Other elements that must be
taken into account are the rhythm of the language, as well as subtext. “The
screenwriter has engineered all sorts of implications and resonances that work
at a deeper level,” says Buchanan. “So a subtitler needs to be aware of the
film’s underlying themes, symbolism, stakes and so on.”

Linguistic variations in syntax,
formality and grammatical gender pose their own problems. Ball cites the use
of “Sie”, the polite German form of “you”, and the less
formal “du”. “Germans will often ask each other, ‘Sollen
wir uns duzen?’ [‘Shall we use the du form?’] which, of course, cannot
be rendered literally into English. Usually you get round it by saying
something like, ‘Shall we use first names?’”

Follow by Email

About: All materials on this site are taken from open sources - have a link back to the material on the Internet or sent by visitors to the site and are provided for informational purposes only. Rights to the materials belong to their owners.